cytotec with no rx Back in January, I said that if Barack Obama won the Democratic primary, he would be the next president of the United States; and if Hillary Clinton won the primary, the Republican candidate would be the next president. John McCain’s campaign (which appears to be imploding) combined with economic uncertainty and real widespread dissatisfaction with the Republican party’s governance of this country all seem to indicate that any Democrat could have beaten any Republican this year. But I still don’t think this is so. If Hillary Clinton had won, we would be looking at an entirely different campaign. And perhaps a McCain presidency.
If McCain were running against Clinton, he would have avoided his single greatest mistake: the selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. He chose her to pick up dissatisfied women voters – voters he would have known he was going to lose if Clinton was the nominee. Instead his plan would have been to dominate among male voters, with a campaign based on national security, the war in Iraq, and fiscal responsibility. In other words, he would have played to his strengths. Instead he is trying to run on the “maverick” card – trying to convince the country that he is a “breath of fresh air” and an outsider – one who just happens to be 72, with almost thirty years of his life spent in Washington. And one who chose a neo-Republican hack, i.e. an political-evangelical Christian, as the person he would want to govern in his place if need be.
Against Clinton McCain would open up another major line of attack on Clinton: that she is too partisan, too liberal, and would not be able to govern from the middle. Unlike the attacks on Obama that he is an extremist liberal, these attacks would in some sense be true. (See Clinton’s book for a glimpse at how she dehumanizes her opponents.) McCain could promise a kind of post-partisan presidency, using Democrat/Independent Lieberman and others to make this point. This would play very well against Clinton (Obama seems to be able to neutralize it because he lacks partisan bile).
Since Clinton was equally a supporter of the Iraq war, this would become a McCain issue, because more people would trust him to try to win the war. In general, he would be seen as more reliable on foreign policy than she is.
What about the economy? It’s true that there’s no way McCain could win as a Bush Republican on economic issues. He would have to run as a moderate on this issue (which he has not done at all, running as a tax-cutting trickle-downer). But this might very well have been the campaign plan against Clinton – tack to the middle. And again, this would have played to McCain’s strengths. He hasn’t always been a Bushie. He hasn’t always pandered to his party. This seems to have been his gameplan to deal with the unknown Obama: energize the base, let racism and anti-big-government sentiment do the rest.
And maybe against another candidate this would have worked. What McCain never saw coming – and the last reason he might have beaten Hillary – is that Obama brings with him a whole new set of voters, a youth movement that will turn out for him in a way they never would have for any other candidate. Turnout this year will be huge, in a way that it would not have been for a McCain – Clinton contest. Clinton v. McCain would not seem like the kind of apocalyptic/messianic contest that Obama v. McCain is. McCain would have had a much better chance with a smaller electorate. But as it is, it looks like the Democrats will indeed return to the White House.
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